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Sunday, 14 February 2016

Managing data-rich
societies wisely and reaching sustainable development are among the greatest
challenges of the 21st century. We are faced with existential threats and huge
opportunities. If we don't act now, large parts of our society will not be able
to economically benefit from the digital revolution. This could lead to mass
unemployment and social unrest. It is time to create the right framework for
the digital society to come.

Cloud
storage, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Self-Driving Cars, and the Internet
of Things (IoT) are just a few of the technological revolutions we have recently
seen. In the meantime, big IT companies and "smart nations" attempt to steer
societies in a certain direction. This process can involve the manipulation of
people's opinions, decisions, and behaviors by "Big Nudging", based on "(super-)intelligent"
computer systems using large amounts of personal data. To serve us well, this
technology must now be made compatible with European law and values, e.g. by embedding
it in a scientific, democratic and responsible ethical framework. Otherwise, we
may see more and more democracies turn into autocratic regimes.

Societies
are not just the sum of their parts and of individual actions. Families,
friendships, social networks, solidarity, and culture are "emergent" phenomena resulting from interactions between
people; what really matters are the interrelations between individual
behaviors. Therefore, steering individual behaviors cannot solve important problems
such as resource shortages, environmental issues, and climate change, fairness,
justice and peace, financial stability and socio-economic well-being,
innovation and jobs for all. These challenges require a different, complementary
approach, focusing on interactions between people, companies, different kinds
of organizations, authorities, and the environment.

As the
connectivity in today's techno-socio-economic systems increases steeply,
systemic complexity does so, too. This
prevents the successful optimization and steering of societal-scale systems in
a centralized way. The main reasons for this are the hardness of some optimization
problems and limitations of predictability and calibration (due to parameter
sensitivity and over-fitting). However, highly performing solutions can often
be realized in real time by means of decentralized approaches. These specify self-organizing systems, which are efficient
and can flexibly adapt to changing conditions.

Importantly,
decentralized solutions leave space for diversity
in the locally pursued goals and enable solutions that fit the respective
context and local culture. Diversity is often favorable for innovation rates, for collective intelligence, and for
socio-economic resilience to unexpected,
disruptive events, as they will surely happen during the digital transformation.

In complex dynamical systems – think about
traffic or the financial markets – the properties of the system components are
often less important than their interactions. This makes such systems hard to control
from the outside, but they tend to produce certain structures, properties, and
functions by self-organization, almost like magic. Unfortunately, the systemic outcome
is not always desirable, as stop-and-go traffic and financial crises show. Now,
however, we can make the "invisible hand" work by means of the Internet of Things, if we operate it
using knowledge from complexity science.

To
reach desirable systemic outcomes by self-organization (i.e. particular structures,
properties, or functions) one has to find suitable kinds of interactions
between the system components. These interactions can be identified by means of
so-called "exploratories": (agent-based)
simulations on supercomputers or multi-player online games in virtual worlds.
For example, cooperation can be supported by information systems that promote
reputation, merit-based matching, costly communication, and co-opetition (a
kind of competition that is compatible with cooperation). Additional work
demonstrates how decentralized traffic assistance mechanisms can be used to
improve the traffic performance on freeways and in cities by 30-40% as compared
to today's operation.

The
implementation of such mechanisms for self-organization ("design for emergence") requires real-time measurements,
which can now be performed with the Internet
of Things: wirelessly communicating sensors allow us to measure the
external effects ("externalities") of interactions between people,
companies, and the environment. It is, for instance, possible to increase
awareness and make progress towards the UN sustainable development goals.

For this, my team at ETH Zurich and
TU Delft's PhD program "Engineering Social Technologies for a Responsible
Digital Future" have started to create the Nervousnet platform together with international partners (see
nervousnet.info). It allows people, companies and devices to engage in three
ways: (1) by contributing data, (2) by analysing the crowd-sourced datasets,
and (3) by sharing code and ideas. Anyone
is able to create data-driven services and products using a generic programming
interface. The aim is to yield societal benefits, business opportunities
and jobs. Nervousnet uses distributed
data storage and distributed control, so that it is more robust to attacks
and centralized manipulation attempts, easy to scale up, and tolerant to
faults. Nervousnet's approach is also compatible with the principles of
informational self-determination and, according to our judgment, with the new
EU Data Protection Directive.

Today, there are several Internet of Things platforms and
data science projects that share Nervousnet's vision. These projects focus on
participatory data collection, on decentralized communication services, or on
big data analytics. Nervousnet aims to meet all three objectives. Furthermore,
Nervousnet will be able to change the interactions in techno-socio-economic-environmental
systems by introducing suitable feedbacks in the system, such that desirable
interactions and self-organization effects result. For example, special driver
assistance systems will dissolve many freeway traffic jams, and self-organized
traffic light control will reduce urban gridlocks. Generally, such feedback
loops could be created with a new exchange system for externalities. I call
this system "finance 4.0". It would be a multi-dimensional,
multi-currency bottom-up system, which also brings benefits for public
authorities, as services and goods would be easily taxable. Eventually, this
could be the basis of a thriving economy 4.0 and a digital society that creates
opportunities for all.

Nervousnet and finance 4.0 will build a
participatory framework complementing
top-down governance approaches with bottom-up elements to unleash the power of
innovation and the potential of civil society. Imagine something like an Apollo
program coordinating and integrating efforts from international FabLabs,
universities, startups, and other stakeholders. This could create the framework
for "governance 4.0". Online
deliberation platforms, for example, could help to bring knowledge and
ideas of many minds (and machine intelligence) together and support collective
intelligence. Platforms for resilience
could empower citizens in crisis situations to help themselves and each other. Sharing economy platforms should enable
the efficient coordination and use of resources, to help us master resource
shortages, the energy transformation and climate change. There are numerous other potential applications of
this framework. We just have to decide to embrace the positive aspects of the
digital era now.

If the digital transformation of our
economy and society ought to succeed, we must create culturally fitting, value-sensitive information and communication
technologies, which benefit as many companies, institutions, employees,
customers and citizens as possible. To be a world leader in responsible innovation, we need to
integrate approaches from the natural, engineering and social sciences. For
example, a "CulturePedia" could
reveal the success principles of the diverse cultures of the world and produce new
solutions, intercultural exchange and new social and economic value. These
approaches can largely benefit from crowd
sourcing and citizen science,
and enable the engagement with and between the citizens, as projects such as
Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap have shown.

In short: The digital economy is not a
"zero-sum game". The combination of Internet of Things technologies
with complexity science and participatory approaches allows us to create an information, innovation, service and
production ecosystem to boost our economy and society in times where
today's jobs are challenged by automation. We should use the unlimited
opportunities offered by the digital world, where information can be reproduced
as often as we like and used in millions of different ways. It is possible now
to reach a higher quality of life for many more people. Therefore, let us build
participatory platforms for governance 4.0 and finance 4.0 together, to create
a suitable framework for our digital future!

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The activities leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 284709 - project 'FuturICT', a Coordination and Support Action in the Information and Communication Technologies activity area